Planet types as gameplay limiters

Whenever you load up a game of Supreme Commander you have several options for limiting gameplay. You can say "No air units", "No nukes", "no experimentals", etc. And I imagine Planetary Annihilation will have similar options. You could say "I hate bombers! No air units in this entire solar system."

And that's fine. But would it be fun to have different planet types that could have their own restrictions? A "No aircraft planet", a "No naval" planet, we already have the water planets that look like they are "No land unit" worlds. And I don't know what the gas giants will be like but I am picturing an aircraft only kind of map.

So for example you could make a solar system where everyone starts on a "no naval" planet and then there is an unoccupied high resource ocean world that doesn't allow aircraft, so everyone has to mix up their game a bit to take the resource rich world.

Barren worlds: With no oceans these worlds wouldn't allow a navy. These would be the easiest to make. You just proceduraly generate a regular planet but don't put an ocean on it. For graphical flare you could replace the trees with cactus, and rolling green hills with rolling sand dunes.

Storm Worlds: High altitude winds and violent lightning storms could prevent the use of aircraft. I guess the only way to get units on or off the planet would be with that Noah Unit Cannon from the kickstarter video since air transports wouldn't work.

Extreme Gravity Worlds: Artillery and strategic missiles wouldn't have enough fuel or kinetic energy to get anywhere, and expirementals would be too large to stand up properly.

Ionized Worlds: Strong magnetic poles, and an ionized atmosphere, would interfere with radar, stealth fields, and shields (if they make it into the game).

And all of these different properties could be combined on planets. You could be on an extreme gravity barren world with storms and strong magnetic poles.

You'd probably want all of these different planetary options to be very visible so that when a player looks at it from a distance they know exactly what they are getting into when they land there. It's easy to tell the difference between a gas giant, water planet, or temperate planet at a distance. A barren world wouldn't have any visible oceans, and would probably look like Dune. A storm world could have moving wispy clouds and constant lightning flashes in the sky. An ionized world would have large aurora borealis stretching out of the poles. And i am not sure how to visually indicate that a planet has high gravity though (large rings maybe?)


Also as an aside. To anyone making a suggestion on the forums, You might want to put a "good idea / bad idea" poll at the top.

I'm not going to say get rid of restriction altogether but I really dislike the use of restrictions and I feel they ruin the game when for example I can only use land due to a restriction but I guess that is why it's an option. If I did like restrictions than I'd say why not have this feature in.

I like it, it forces you to change strategies. it's a bit of an extension of the gas giants that already disallow land/sea.
But it would really depend on how varied the restricted units are. it would be hard to balance the partial armys, so the counters are not cut from a plant.

Frankly between the planet types and procedural generation I think this kind of thing will happen naturally.

Mike

Normally I would be against it, seeing as it would give certain factions an advantage/disadvantage, but well, this game only has one faction, so I say.... YEAH! So long as it can be turned off of course.

This is actually an awesome idea; it adds loads of strategy and all.

However, I do feel this needs to be customisable, as in, which gameplay limiting planets do I want, what type must my starting planet be (type 1, type 2... , same as opponent, random) and should this and this type be very rare, while this other type would be very common?

We have a lot of examples of planets without water. None of them have cacti on them. There's enough variety in dry planets to do something other than the cliche of dunes and saguaro.

it would be weird if planes could fly on a moon obviously. I think these restrictions will com naturally into PA.

There could be several parameters:

Water on surface => navy!
Land on surface => land units
Atmosphere on planet => air units
low gravity (small planet) without atmosphere => hovering units on engines (like the engineers in the trailer, that can start themselves from a moon)


And now you could start all kind of combinations. Of course, a planet without atmosphere is unlikely to have water on surface, but maybe we find a way^^

I think, lava planets can be anti-aircraft. Not "you can't use it here!" sort of thing, but all flying units would be constantly damaged by volcanic ash.

I like the idea of planetary restrictions. They would add nice bit of diversity in gameplay, forcing players to use different strategies. But I don't like High gravity idea.

I really like this idea, especially if it fits the planet, aka no air on the planet no aircraft. As having aircraft would make it unrealistic.

Also a high gravity would not allowing long range would be nice. Someone on another topic suggest cold effect weapons, this would be good to, colder the planet or moon, better weapons perform up to a certain limit.

Best way to do this is to not place any actual restrictions. Let someone build aircraft if they want to, just have them take damage if they're flying around. Let someone build artillery if they want to, just have it not fire as far.

I'm not sure if it will be possible in the engine, but that's probably the best way to handle it.

I support this idea, I think this was already getting into the game by some extent, but expanding on the idea is a good thing to do.

This one of those ideas that focuses on larger strategy, rather than micro. For that reason alone (and that it is NOT about factions ) makes this one of the better ideas I've read lately

This would link unit restrictions directly to the generated play field. And would make the galactic war way more interesting, as each game you can employ different combinations of units. Or making certain units less effective on certain planets, so you discover alternative strategies.

I do think in "normal" skirmish games non-restrictive planets should be more common than restrictive planets though.

uber seems to dissagree with you

In those pictures, the aircraft are hovercraft with jet (edit: silly me, I didn't mean jet but rocket) engines. Obviously those would still work as Action=-reaction still counts in a vacuum. Regular aircraft use aerodynamic laws, like bernoulli's law to fly. And those don't work on a moon

VTOLs with non-airbreathing-engines, like the rocket engines on those builders(?) pointed downwards, will work without having an atmosphere, as long as the rocket fuel has an oxidizer in the mix.

There could be different classes of aircraft, of which only some would be able to fly without atmosphere, but would normally be less cost-effective than air-breathing-engine craft and/or be utility craft, like troop transports)

Aircraft in a vacuum makes me cry, jet engines in a vacuum make me cry. Rocket VTOLS, or whatever funky space name you want to make up is fine. But things that fly in a vacuum should not be labeled as things that depend on air. I think Battletech had a good solution, call them aerospace fighters.

Those who awesome quote at me should go find the realism PSA

Overall, I think it's a decent idea. Of course some (many?) planets should also be unrestricted as well. At the end of the day, the point is variety. Ideally in my mind, you would see a variety of these in a single system, or in other words, in a single battle. So you'll have to adapt tactics from planet to planet

Of course players that truly do want a hard restriction in a game can customize a map to have all planets of a certain type to make that happen. Other players who want no restrictions, can do this too. Perhaps there should be optional buttons to click on at map generation to make decisions like this without requiring a player to bust out a system/planet editor.

The default random procedurally generated system should probably fall somewhere between these two extremes.

NOTE: I'm not getting into the details of your different examples of planet types to restrict various things. I don't agree with all of them, but the overall idea itself is sound. That's just arguing over details.

Going along with Neutrino's comments regarding choosing your own start position, introducing different planet type modifiers would go a long way to making those start position decisions more strategic.

My thoughts are much like those already stated:
- Solid surface allows land units
- Water surface allows naval units
- Atmosphere allows air units
- Lava restricts land and naval units
- ... and so on

Basic aircraft wouldn't function without an atmosphere, or perhaps they would just fly slower/lower and be easier to hit.

Advanced 'air' units would still function without atmospheres. Some other naming convention could be used to distinguish them as 'space'craft/aerospace fighters/etc...

"Awesome!" idea

no they dont. you just didnt understand my post:

This. If there are restrictions, they should either be obvious (no water means no naval units) or otherwise flow directly from the properties of the environment (as in your suggestions).